


Swich Skilful Arms

by inurashii



Category: Caves of Qud (Video Game)
Genre: Character Death, Cryogenics, Love Potion/Spell, Other, Weapons, fight
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-10
Updated: 2017-10-10
Packaged: 2019-01-15 12:43:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12321324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inurashii/pseuds/inurashii
Summary: When an intrepid delver reaches the final floors of Bethesda Susa's Cryobarrios, they are horrified to see the release of a legendary killer known to myth as Saad Amus the Sky-Bear. Things rapidly become very intense, and very complicated.





	Swich Skilful Arms

I descend the final staircase slowly. I take step after hesitating step, knowing that whatever awaits me on this final floor of the cryobarrios will likely be even more fearsome than the phase spider I narrowly avoided above. I take care to keep my breaths steady, cold air in my nose and warm air out from my mouth as I step from the stairwell alcove.

My cybernetics adjust to the darkness quickly, scanning the room for threats and—to my unsurprised horror—finding one immediately. A semi-nude figure, its grotesquely-bulging muscles glistening with half-melted frost, hoists a missile launcher to its shoulder and takes aim at a stone-still basilisk. Before I can flex my pentacips to spring into a deadly lunge, the rocket hisses through the air and strikes a crystalline cage containing a humanoid silhouette. The tube shatters, spilling its roiling, frigid mist onto the icy floor.

I gasp, a surge of fear jerking at my heart. This deep in Bethesda Susa, only the most dangerous specimens are kept in stasis. The Yempuris Phi, a root that spreads a hundred times faster than qudzu and chokes everything in its path to death. The Rhinox, a beast whose charge can crack fulcrete. And—

Enough. I've come too far to spend my final moments in fear. Jamming a tonic injector into my arm, I rush forward and strike down the drug-addled man before he can fire the rocket launcher again, severing his arm at the shoulder with my axe and following it up with a deadly throat strike from my dagger. As he falls, the basilisk turns a gimlet eye to me before closing it, evidently disinclined to show further gratitude but uninterested in fighting me.

And yet, I know I am not safe.

The silhouette that had been floating in the center of a zero-kelvin miasma only moments ago rises to its feet. The stranger is True Kin like me, a man in strikingly undamaged ceremonial robes, his bare arms perfectly sculpted of ropy muscle, one of them already holding a humming sickle-sword. The man raises his head, squares his shoulders, settles into the royal bearing that he must have carried before he was frozen decades ago. If I needed further assurance that I stood before a frightful legend, the chrome tubes strapped to his back, a named jetpack I thought to be myth, is more than enough proof.

"Saad Amus," I breathe, "Sky-Bear."

His handsome face turns to me, and then I see the shine of his eyes. Pouring malice and mania in equal measure, his gaze locks onto mine and an imperious, vicious smile spreads across his face. "Aye," he growls, voice thick from decades of frozen disuse. "And who'rt thou? Jailor or grave robber?"

"I..." My voice is dead in my throat.

"Tis all one," he says scarcely a moment later, raising his vibrokhopesh in a dueling stance. "A corpse, soon enough. En garde!"

I take one step and he is upon me.

Propelled forward by the unstoppable force of the Flume-Flier, Saad Amus closes the distance between us in moments, sending me reeling and spinning in a vain attempt to defend myself. I lash out with my axe and its fullerite head glances off his shoulder, leaving a superficial wound. He turns and twists his khopesh and I gasp as my arm twists and the axe is forced from my grip.

I lunge forward with my dagger before my axe hits the ground, and he grunts in pain as I bury its blade in his shoulder. He shoves me away and swings his sword upward, knocking the knife out of my jarred fingers. I stumble backward to draw my laser pistols, but the duelist relieves me of them in mere moments, sending them skittering along the ground.

I hesitate. I have faced many warriors, beasts, and monsters, but now I square off against a man who trained his whole life to fight armed humans and I am unready. I am wholly unready, and now I am unarmed too. My hands scramble at my belt as I take a few running steps away from Saad Amus, aware that I can never outrun him while he wears his flume-flier. For a moment, my hand rests on the pouch where I store my prickly-boons, and I get a wild, last-resort idea.

Identifying it by feel alone, I pull a tonic from that pouch and clutch it desperately as I turn back toward the Sky-Bear, stance wide and low.

"Bereft of arms and still defiant?" He laughs. "A wonder thou 'st lived so long."

He leaps forward. I raise my offhand to catch the vibrokhopesh, shouting in pain as it shears the skin from my arm. It hurts like little I've ever experienced, but now I'm behind his guard, giving me the moment I need to bring my hand down and plunge the love injector down into the skin directly above his collarbone. His eyes widen as he realizes what I've done, and my body slams into his as I press the injector's button, delivering its contents into his bloodstream.

For a moment, we are still, eyes locked. A second passes, and his ceremonial vibrokhopesh clatters to the ground. Another second ticks by, and his pupils dilate. Another.

"Sun and moon," he breathes.

I shove away from him, letting the used injector drop to the ground and fumbling for a bandage to wrap around my damaged arm.

"I've hurt you," he growls, and clears his throat. When he speaks again, there is a melodic clarity to his voice, the princely poise that produced songs about him returning. "I am... so sorry."

"It's nothing," I murmur, pulling the gauze around my forearm.

He is at my side at once. "I've harmed such a creature of beauty. Art th—are you man or woman? Tis all one. I love you. Please, stay here with me."

"No." I turn to gather my weapons from the ground, trying not to meet the eyes of the chemically-lovesick man. The man who nearly killed me only moments ago, now following me like a puppy. I holster my pistols, heft my axe and dagger. "I've got a job to do down below."

"I will accompany you!" Saad Amus insists, scooping up his weapon and walking toward the elevator. "I will go ahead, and slay anything that dares threaten you."

Sighing, I look over at him. At his perfect, muscular body, at his near-immaculate robes. At the humming sickle-blade emitting the vaporized blood that it drew from my arm.

I tense, and I lunge.

Saad Amus cries out and falls to his knees, the hilt of my dagger protruding from his back. My aim was true; his voice gurgles with blood from a ruptured lung as he turns toward me and tries to speak. "My love..."

I set my jaw, raise my battle axe, and bring it down on his neck as hard as I can. My entire body shakes as I step back, releasing the axe's haft and staring down at the corpse of the living legend that I slew in cold blood. The man who defeated me fairly, whom I then killed through cunning and betrayal.

"He would have killed me," I say aloud to myself. "The tonic would have run out in a few days. He would have turned against me just as I turned on him. Killed countless innocents. This... this was the right thing. Barathrum is counting on me."

I fall silent and breathe heavily for a few moments, then laugh. "Who... am I trying to convince?"

And then. And then.

My mind starts to cloud over again as the rare sphinx salt tonic, the one I applied before the fight even began, approaches its end. I realize in that moment that everything I'd seen and done has been a vision, a story of things that could happen but... haven't. Not yet. I could choose to let my mind perform those actions, rote, let things carry out to this point once again. My defeat and murder of Saad Amus the Sky-Bear would occur exactly as I just imagined it, if I allow.

Or I could choose differently. I could go back to the moment before my vision began. Choose something else. Fight fair, and allow the ancient warrior to kill me. Ensorcel him with the love injector, but refrain from stabbing him in the back. But then what? Proselytize a more peaceful life to the most imperious being I have ever met? I'd be as likely to change the mind of a sparking baetyl. I find myself unsure of why I would even consider another outcome, when this one is clearly the safest and best. There shouldn't even be a choice to be made here.

But the choice _is_ there, and I am running out of time in which to make it.

Return to the beginning of my vision? Yes... or no?


End file.
